Christopher Morahan, left, with the writer Michael Frayn, producer Michael Codron and actor John Cleese on the set of the film Clockwise in 1986.
Photograph: Alamy

In an age when it is fashionable for directors to be regarded as auteurs, Christopher Morahan, who has died aged 87, was a supreme craftsman. In a rich 60-year-long career, he proved equally at home in television, theatre and film and worked with many of the best writers, including Harold Pinter, Michael Frayn and Simon Gray. But he will be best remembered for two TV landmarks: John Hopkins’ quartet of plays, Talking to a Stranger (1966), and the 14-part series The Jewel in the Crown (1984), on which he was producer and co-director. His death coincided with that of his friend Tim Pigott-Smith, who starred in Granada’s epic series about India.

It was Morahan’s decision to shoot that series on film, to use archive footage to provide historical perspective and to cast a number of then relatively little-known actors, including Pigott-Smith, Art Malik and Susan Wooldridge, in lead roles. If the result was a triumph, much of the credit belongs to Morahan.

Born in London, to Thomas, a production designer, and his wife, Nancy (nee Barker), Morahan went to Highgate school. His father originally hoped his son would become an architect, but Morahan gravitated towards acting and spent a year in weekly rep in Henley-on-Thames. In 1947 he joined the Old Vic Theatre school, set up by Michel Saint-Denis as a rigorous training ground for the next generation. It was there that he realised he had a mission to direct. He started as a floor manager at Associated Television working on a twice-weekly medical soap, Emergency-Ward 10. Eventually, in 1957, he graduated to directing and found he loved the adrenalin buzz of live TV.

The 1960s were a golden age in television, and from 1962 to 1964 Morahan worked on the BBC’s Z-Cars and formed a close bond with John Hopkins, one of the series’ writers. In 1965 he directed, for The Wednesday Play, Hopkins’ Fable, which satirised apartheid, imagining a Britain ruled by a black minority. But the partnership with Hopkins bore even greater fruit in Talking to a Stranger, which was heralded as a coming of age for TV drama. Over four 90-minute episodes, the play examined the tensions in a family from the perspective of its individual members. Morahan got brilliant performances from all his cast, including Maurice Denham, Margery Mason and Michael Bryant, but it was Judi Dench as the daughter, forced to reveal her pregnancy to her tight-lipped parents, who astonished everyone.

“With a genius like Judi,” said Morahan, “you just had to let her fly.”

In 1967 Morahan made his debut as a theatre director with Jules Feiffer’s Little Murders for the RSC. He went on to direct David Mercer’s Flint in the West End and Pinter’s The Caretaker, with a manically funny Leonard Rossiter, at the Mermaid, but was enticed back to the BBC to become head of plays, television, in 1972. He not only encouraged the co-existence, in a way unthinkable today, of new plays and theatrical classics, but actively promoted a four-part drama about working-class life from 1916 to 1926, Days of Hope, directed by Ken Loach and written by Jim Allen. That series alone confirms Morahan was always that rare creature: a progressive with a sense of the past.

Morahan produced and co-directed The Jewel in the Crown for Granada. Photograph: ITV/Rex/Shutterstock

That was one of the reasons Peter Hall asked Morahan to join him as deputy director at the National Theatre in 1977. “He knows the whole repertoire,” wrote Hall in his Diaries, “and I think he would provide a centre of sanity and knowledge.” Those qualities were much needed at a time when the fledgling National was rocked by industrial disputes, but Morahan directed a number of first-rate productions by Ibsen (Brand and The Wild Duck), Tolstoy (The Fruits of Enlightenment) and, most especially, George Bernard Shaw (The Philanderer, Man and Superman), with whom he had a natural affinity. Rather than brandishing extravagant concepts, Morahan saw his prime task as that of realising the writer’s intentions.

While at the National, Morahan read Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet and was asked by Denis Forman, chairman of Granada TV, to act as producer and co-director, along with Jim O’Brien, on the TV series that became The Jewel in the Crown.

Far from resting on his laurels, Morahan went on to pursue an active career across all media. In 1986 he directed the film Clockwise, with a screenplay by Michael Frayn, in which John Cleese as a comprehensive school head struggles to reach an annual conference. The next year, for BBC TV, he made a macabre comedy by Gray, After Pilkington, starring Bob Peck and Miranda Richardson, of which he was especially proud. And in 1989 he directed a masterly TV film of Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day scripted by Pinter. Transmitted late at night over Christmas, it remains one of British TV’s best-kept secrets.

Morahan continued to work extensively in the theatre, directing Wilde and Shaw at Chichester, reviving The Caretaker with Jonathan Pryce and giving a first showing to a new adaptation of Pinter’s The Dwarfs, which gave fresh prominence to the novel’s female character. Morahan was a man for all seasons, and all media, whose career was governed by a fastidious belief in the primacy of the writer and the actor. In the process he helped to make television history. In 2011 he was appointed CBE.

I knew Morahan slightly through his second wife, the actress Anna Carteret. At first I found him faintly intimidating but, underneath his reserve, he was a warm, funny human being. Last year I interviewed him for a BFI season celebrating his work in television and he told any number of good stories. One revealed how, while working as an assistant to the designer on Orson Welles’s stage version of Othello, he was deputed to buy a corset to contain the great man’s girth and even stood up to him when Welles tried to bully him into staying with the production on tour. But the thread that ran through our conversation was Morahan’s happy recollection of a vanished TV world when, especially at the BBC, controllers created a collegiate atmosphere and “the doors were always open” to writers, directors and producers.

In 1954 he married Joan Murray. They had three children, Ben and Andrew and Lucy. Lucy predeceased him. After Joan’s death in 1973 he married Anna, with whom he had two children, Rebecca and Hattie. He is survived by Anna and his four children.

• Christopher Thomas Morahan, director, born 9 July 1929; died 7 April 2017